WikiLeaks

As with most completely polarizing issues nowadays, I don't know what to think when it comes to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Reddit, populated as it is with youthful idealists who believe they're highly intelligent, is about ready to canonize the man. Meanwhile, Tom Flanagan, who used to be chief adviser to our PM, is openly calling for Assange's assassination...that's "cannon-ization" of a whole other sort.

Look, we'd all love to live in a world where government practiced openness and accountability, and hey-can't-we-all-just-get-along mated with power-with-not-power-over to produce utopia.

I don't do drugs, myself.

Calling what Assange does "journalism" is kind of like calling global thermonuclear war a "skirmish". WikiLeaks is a data dump, pure and simple. As with any dump, combing through this is apt to net you some overlooked treasure...not to mention a few diseases.

Oh, some of the stuff is trivial and obvious. For instance, the revelation that Canadian TV is replete with anti-American stereotypes that confirm this country's "inferiority complex". (Psst: wanna hear a secret? That inferiority complex often masquerades as a superiority complex. Quite convincingly, too.)

That class of revelation is hardly likely to provoke confrontation. But how about the confirmation of Iran's involvement in Iraq? How about the nitty-gritty on American espionage procedures? And who knows what's next down the leaky pipe.

SOME OF THIS SHIT SHOULD STAY SECRET.

Not all of it. Perhaps not even most of it. But some of it should stay secret. To thrust everything out into the open endangers lives, and not just the lives of those trying to keep the secrets. The world is not Facebook. Privacy and confidentiality are important.